Entries tagged python

I (grudgingly) use the Calibre e-book management software to handle my collection of books, and copy them over to my kindle-toy.

One thing that has always bothered me was the fact that when books are imported their ratings are too. If I receive a small sample of ebooks from a friend their ratings are added to my collections.

I've always regarded ratings as things personal to me, rather than attributes of a book itself; as my tastes might not match yours, and vice-versa.

On that basis the last time I was importing a small number of books and getting annoyed at having to manually reset all the imported ratings I decided to do something about it. I started hacking and put together a simple Calibre plugin to automatically zero ratings when books are imported to the collection (i.e. set the rating to be zero).

Sadly this work wasn't painless, despite the small size, as an unfortunate bug in Calibre meant my plugin method wasn't called. Happily Kovid Goyal helped me work through the problem, and he committed a fix that will be in the next Calibre release. For the moment I'm using today's git-snapshot and it works well.

Similarly I've recently started using extended file attributes to store metadata on my desktop system. Unfortunately the GNU findutils package doesn't allow you to do the obvious thing:

$ find ~/foo -xattr user.comment
/home/skx/foo/bar/t.txt
/home/skx/foo/bar/xc.txt
/home/skx/foo/bar/x.txt

There are several xattr patches floating around, but I had to bundle my own in debian/patches to get support for finding files that have particular attribute names.

Maybe one day extended attributes will be taken seriously. (rsync, cp, etc will preserve them. I'm hazy on the compatibility with tar, but most things seem to be working.)

Tags: calibre, findutils, python, wikipedia | 4 comments

Much has already been written about the recent bash security problem, allocated the CVE identifier CVE-2014-6271, so I'm not even going to touch it.

It did remind me to double-check my systems to make sure that I didn't have any packages installed that I didn't need though, because obviously having fewer packages installed and fewer services running reduces the potential attack surface.

I had noticed in the past I had python installed and just though "Oh, yeah, I must have python utilities running". It turns out though that on 16 out of 19 servers I control I had python installed solely for the lsb_release script!

So I hacked up a horrible replacement for `lsb_release in pure shell, and then became cruel:

~ # dpkg --purge python python-minimal python2.7 python2.7-minimal lsb-release

That horrible replacement is horrible because it defers detection of all the names/numbers to the /etc/os-release which wasn't present in earlier versions of Debian. Happily all my Debian GNU/Linux hosts run Wheezy or later, so it all works out.

So that left three hosts that had a legitimate use for Python:

• My mail-host runs offlineimap
  • So I purged it.
  • I replaced it with isync.
• My host-machine runs KVM guests, via qemu-kvm.
  • qemu-kvm depends on Python solely for the script /usr/bin/kvm_stat.
  • I'm not pleased about that but will tolerate it for now.
• The final host was my ex-mercurial host.
  • Since I've switched to git I just removed tha package.

So now 1/19 hosts has Python installed. I'm not averse to the language, but given that I don't personally develop in it very often (read "once or twice in the past year") and by accident I had no python-scripts installed I see no reason to keep it on the off-chance.

My biggest surprise of the day was that now that we can use dash as our default shell we still can't purge bash. Since it is marked as Essential. Perhaps in the future.

Tags: kvm, offlineimap, python | 11 comments

I'm not sure if I've talked about my job here, but I recently celebrated my one year anniversary - whilst on a company offsite trip to Sweden. When I joined the company there were approximately 100 people employed by it. Nowadays the numbers are much higher.

Having more people around is pretty awesome, but I realized that there were a lot of people wandering around the office who I didn't recognize so it occurred to me to make a game of it.

I had the idea I could write a slack bot to quiz me on my colleagues:

• Show a random face, using the Slack profile picture.
• Give a list of 5 names.
• Ask me which was correct.

I spent an hour messing around with various Slack APIs, and decided the whole thing was too much of a hassle. Instead I wrote a simple script to download the details of all members of the workspace:

• Name.
• Email address.
• Profile picture URL.

Then using that data, users.json, I hacked up a simple web application in Python, using the flask API. There only needed to be two pages:

• A page ("/") to show five random images, each with five random names beneath them.
• A page ("/quiz") to receive the HTTP POST, and score.

All in all this took only two hours or so. Old-school CGI is pretty awesome like that - Hidden values meant the whole thing could be stateless:

 <input type="hidden" name="1answer" value="Bob Smith" ..
 <input type="hidden" name="1profile" value="Sales" ..
 <input type="hidden" name="1url" value="https://.." ..

 <input type="hidden" name="2answer" value="Sally Smith" ..
 <input type="hidden" name="2profile" value="Sales" ..
 <input type="hidden" name="2url" value="https://.." ..

The only downside is that I don't have any authentication, so there is no ability to have a leaderboard. I've looked at the Okta samples and I think it would be easy to add, but I guess that would make it more complex and less portable. That said I'm not sharing the code this time, so who cares if it is tied to the company?

Anyway sometimes I forget how fast and easy it is to spinup a random virtual machine and present a HTTP(S) service for interactive use. This is one of those times when I remembered.

Tags: cgi, python, slack, work | 2 comments